Walk-Through (Creating A Sample Survey)

Following steps in this article you will create a sample environmental survey from scratch. The whole idea is to automatically display a screen of preset drop-down lists when button ‘Add Point’ is pressed:

1. Survey purpose:

The purpose of the survey is to gather the distribution of the trees in a public park including their height.

We need also to get at least one picture for each asset.

 

2. Creating a set of attributes 

To create new set of attributes please open the navigation drawer and choose ‘Manage Attributes’ option, then press the ‘Add’ icon in the top right corner:

 

 

 

To add new fields ‘Species’ and ‘Height’ we need to edit the attribute properties. Please choose the recently added set and click the ‘Pencil’ icon from the context menu.

 

Note: Field is a category/property/attribute with a set of values – e.g. in our example we need to create 2 fields:

• species (set of trees species growing in our test area)
• height (several height ranges we want to register)

To create field species  please press the + (Add) button, provide the name in our case ‘species‘ and press the button ‘+‘ (Add) ones more to add a value:

 

Please add few species to the attribute – defined values will be then displayed within a drop down list when ‘Add Point’ button is pressed.

Please get back to ‘Edit project’ screen and add new attribute called height:

 

Field’s values can be also imported from the text file, please follow steps in this article to get the values imported: http://mapitgis.com/import-values 

On the ‘Add Field’ screen we can also add a so called ‘Scalar field’-  it will be displayed as a free text – or Yes/No spinner.

The ‘text field’ can also have a default value. This value will be set automatically when ‘Add feature’ button is pressed.

At the end of the process the ‘Edit Attribute’ screen should look as below:

 

 

At this point the attribute set is ready to use. To start the survey we need now to create the survey layer and set the default attribute set.

3. Creating a survey layer

To add a new layer and use it to collect the survey information please go to ‘ Layer Management‘ and press ‘Add Layer‘ button.

When setting a layer name it’s highly recommended not to use special characters like: / \ ? ‘ ; : ” | . , ^.

The layer name is used to create e.g. a ‘pictures’ sub-folder in MapIt → Pictures and these special characters may cause problems on certain devices. Similarly the layer name is used to name the file during an export operation and some special characters may cause problems as well. The advice is to use alpha-numeric strings with spaces, dashes or underscores as delimiters.

Set the default attribute set – if you leave it as ‘None’ you will be able to create points containing only the name and a description.

When adding new layer you can also set the new layer as active or choose a field for labels when the checkbox ‘Show labels’ is checked.

You can also choose colors for new markers or lines or set outline color and fill for polygon geometry type.

 

Some Layer properties can be changed later, however layer name, attribute set and geometry type can be set only during create layer operation.

 

4. Collecting the data

When there is an active layer you will see a screen containing dropdown lists for the preset attributes each time you press the ‘Add Point‘ button when collecting the data .

 

You can add one or more pictures before saving the point (Pictures will be saved to SD card → MapIt → Pictures folder)

 

4. Export your survey

When the survey is finished you can export your data to SHP files, CSV, KML, geoJSON, ArcGIS JSON, DXF (Geometry Only).

Exported data will be saved to SD Card.

Moreover they can be shared using a number of standard ways including e.g. Email, GoogleDrive and Skype.